‘Neighbourhood in mourning’ as Parc Oxygène razed for condo development

WITH VIDEO: A beloved laneway garden in the Milton Park sector of the Plateau–Mont-Royal borough that neighbours had dubbed “Parc Oxygène,” tended for 17 years and defended from development, is now a pile of dirt and rubble.

On Thursday, June 26, 2014, a local cuts through, for the last time, Parc Oxygène, a greened lane-way, on Hutchison St just north of Prince-Arthur St in Montreal, that residents have been tending to for 30 years, that was being bulldozed to make way for a condo project. (Dave Sidaway / THE GAZETTE)

MONTREAL – A beloved laneway garden in the Milton Park sector of the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough that neighbours had dubbed “Parc Oxygène,” tended for 17 years and defended from development, is now a pile of dirt and rubble.

Bulldozers moved in early Thursday morning, after a last-ditch effort by an association of nearby housing co-ops to get a court injunction to stop a condo development on the lot failed.

Norman Nawrocki, who has organized dozens of “love-ins” at Parc Oxygène over the years and rallied his neighbours to the cause, said he was “shocked” and “devastated” to hear bulldozers in the laneway beside his home on Hutchison Ave. at 7 a.m. Trees and shrubs that had been purchased, planted and maintained by the community over the years were all uprooted in a matter of minutes.

“It took 20 years to build and about 20 minutes to destroy; our neighbourhood is now mourning,” said Wayne Wood, who lives in a housing co-op on nearby Park Ave.

The lot measures about seven metres wide by 30 metres long. It is privately owned and zoned for residential development, but for many years it was vacant. Residents grew frustrated in the early 1990s with the cars and taxis using the laneway as a shortcut from Park Ave. to Hutchison St., posing a danger to their children who played in the laneway. They began to lobby city officials to buy the land and turn it into a municipal parkette.

When that effort got nowhere, in June 1997, neighbours got together, dug up some of the asphalt in the laneway and planted a tree. From there the project grew, with community members investing hundreds of dollars and hours of their time to create what they considered an urban oasis in a sector that has few neighbourhood parks.

But last February, the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough council approved a demand by the owner of the lot to build a three-storey condo on the spot.

And on Monday, Superior Court Judge Gérard Dugré refused a motion by the Syndicat de la Copropriété Communauté Milton Parc to grant an injunction stopping the city from emitting a building permit and the developer from demolishing the garden.

The association of housing co-ops claims to have a long-standing right of passage to part of the laneway, which they contend would make the condo project unbuildable. The judge did not agree that saving the trees and shrubs was urgent, and refused to grant an injunction to stop the work. He urged the two parties to go to court to determine whether the right of passage exists or has expired.

The Projet Montréal city councillor for the district, Alex Norris, had urged the housing co-op association to go to court to have their right-of-way enforced by the courts. On Thursday, he said he was surprised and disappointed about the judge’s decision not to grant an injunction.

“That decision saddens me, and what happened this morning saddens me, but it has to be remembered that this is a privately owned lot that has always been zoned residential. At this point, the only way to keep it would have been for the borough to acquire it and that would have simply cost the borough too much. It would have cost about half-a-million dollars for a plot that is only seven metres wide.”

Norris said the work and devotion of the Milton Park community to keeping the space green is commendable. He also made a promise to compensate for the loss of greenery in the neighbourhood.

“I am committing to doing my utmost to ensure that by the end of this mandate, Milton Park has more green and public spaces, bigger than the size of this lot,” he said.

He said he is not overly concerned about political fallout for his party’s decision not to expropriate the land.

“There may well be (fallout), but you can’t just make decisions based on political pressure. You have to look into your heart and ask if you can really justify spending that much money on such a small plot of land when we have a limited budget. We have to make choices. It is wonderful that a group of people invested so much energy in creating a garden and keeping it so pretty for so long … But whenever you decide to plant something on someone else’s land, you run the risk of it not lasting forever.”

Nawrocki was not appeased by Norris’s promise of more public green space elsewhere in the sector. He said the borough could have helped the group come up with a land swap that would have cost less than $500,000 and saved Parc Oxygène.

“I’m proud that symbolically we proved that as a community we could stand together and hold off a developer for all this time, but to be stabbed in the back in the end by Projet Montréal …”

Nawrocki noted that the condo is not yet built, so perhaps the battle is not yet over. The housing co-op association still has the option to go to court to defend its historical right of passage in the lane way.

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